What is QBasic / QuickBasic?

QBasic is an old-school, vintage programming language that was designed for beginners. QBasic ran on MS-DOS, and was a more advanced version of BASIC. QB was a lot of people’s first foray into programming (particularly those of us who grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s). Therefore, a lot of people look back at QBasic with nostalgia.

From about 1995 - 2010 or so, there was a very active QBasic community online, primarily focused on making home brew games and RPGs. The QBasic scene has since largely disbanded, but still exists in spirit with QB64 and Freebasic.

Check out our Intro To QBasic page for a more information about the different iterations, or to download QuickBasic.

What’s the deal with QBasic in 2018?

QBasic is an outdated programming language and compiler, that is sadly no longer compatible with today’s computers. Back in the Windows 3.x / 95 / 98 / ME days, computers still booted into MS-DOS before they booted into Windows, so QB ran fairly seamlessly. It was also included for free with every version of Windows up through ’98. With the release of Windows XP in 2001, and the subsequent releases of Windows Vista and Windows 7 and Windows 10, QBasic is no longer properly supported. However, a few modern alternatives have been developed that have maintained QBasic’s syntax...

What are the alternatives?

QBasic isn’t dead! It lives on through two leading QBasic-compatible compilers that run on modern computers: Freebasic and QB64.

Both QB64 and Freebasic are designed to run QBasic code on today's computers (Windows 7 or 10, Linux, and Mac) with little to no modifications! They also have relatively active communities...much more active than QBasic these days. If you are looking into learning BASIC, I highly recommend checking out one or both of these compilers.

Where are all the people at?

The “QMunity” still has remnants in a few places around the web. These are the most active QBasic forums left:

I’m looking for QBasic Games! Where can I find them?

The best places to find QBasic games online:

QBasic Games Directory - The single most complete archive of QBasic Games, which was collected by Dean Janjic. It includes 486 QBasic games, all reviewed on a ten point scale, with short summaries, and screenshots. (Final update 2017.) There is also a sister site worth checking out - Freebasic Games Directory with 200+ FB games.

V Planet! - Around 150 QB games with full in-depth reviews, and screenshots. If a QB game was any good, it will be found here. (Mirror from 2004)

QB45.org and QB45 (Bigfoot Edition) - Two different mirrors of the old QB45.com website, from different iterations. QB45.com, formerly known as "Future Software," has always has one of the biggest collections of QBasic downloads ever collected (1700+ files), and thankfully has been mirrored.

QBRPGs.com - QBRPGs is home to 131 different QBasic RPGs, along with tutorials and utilities to help you make your own RPG. (Mirror, circa 2003)

QuickBasic Cafe - German QBasic site with a large collection of games, and still occasionally updated as recently as 2018.

Phatcode.net - A small collection of downloads at this site, but Plasma from PhatCode gets a special shoutout for providing free hosting for many smaller QBasic websites. Check out his site for links to a few dozen QB sites that are still online.

Not to mention our own collection of several hundred QBasic games right here at Pete's QB Site! Reviews / Downloads

How can I run these QBasic games?

It’s tricky, but it’s not impossible. The most success I’ve had is via emulating DOS with DOSBox, though it can be slow and glitchy. Luckily, Quickbasic Cafe wrote a Tutorial on using DOSBOX to run QBasic games.

If you’re running an earlier version of Windows (Vista or earlier), check out this "Running QBasic Games FAQ" written a few years ago by Dean Janjic. This teaches you some tricks to deal with memory or sound issues, and various hardware compatibility problems.

What happened to all of the old QB sites from the good old days?

There used to be hundreds of QB sites on the Internet (see my giant collection of over 500 dead links). Now, nearly all of them are no longer online, mostly due to free web hosts like GeoCities shutting down. However, there are a few QB sites that are still online. The best sites that are still up, as of 2018, are the ones linked above. Another decent list is Plasma's links page of QB/FB websites found here. Many of the older websites are sadly lost forever, or only available via Archive.org.

What about all the old QBasic Zines?

You’re in luck! I’ve archived most of the old QBasic Zines I've been able to get my hands on, which are a wonderful time capsule. Check out the Zines section, or click one of these links:

What’s the deal with this website?

I started Pete’s QBasic Site in 1998 when I was 13 years old. (Now I’m in my 30s.) This site has always had a focus on QBasic gaming, at first being known for QBasic game reviews, and later, for our zine QB Express. I also gathered a massive collection of QB programming tutorials, which at this point is probably our greatest resource. I've kept this website up because there aren't too many other QBasic resources still online and operating, and I hope to keep this archive online for a long time to come. More than anything, this is an exercise in nostalgia for the few members of the QBasic community who still come around, but who knows, maybe someone else will find this content useful.

Pete, what are you up to these days?

I am a TV Producer, and I like to travel. Check out my personal website to see what I’ve been up to!

October 12, 2018Twenty Year Anniversary Update
My oh my, does time fly! Pete's QB Site is now TWENTY years old... and it has been a full decade since the last update. (Yikes!)

Although I retired from updating this site and publishing QB Express in 2008, I've always intended to keep this site online forever as a resource. Pete's QB Site is here for the few diehards out there, who are still puttering away with BASIC almost two decades into the 21st century.

It's pretty quiet around here these days. Since the last update ten years ago, the QBasic community has all but scattered. It has a lot to do with computers no longer supporting QBasic the way they used to. The Freebasic community grew, peaked, and then slowed down to a crawl. And QB64 was launched and grew its own small but loyal following of nostalgic programmers. (QB64 seems to be where the most activity is these days in the QB world.)

What is new here? Well, the front page is the main update. I've turned it into a FAQ / "Landing Page" for people looking for information about QBasic in 2018. It will help direct new users to QB64 and Freebasic, as well as the handful of sites where the last vestiges and archives of the old Qmunity remain.

The other major update was to the Zines archive. Since 2008, there were three major QB/FB zines that were published, and I have archived them here to make sure that they are preserved for posterity: PCOPY! (2006-2008), Back2Basic(2010-2012) and Basic Gaming (2011-2012).

Additionally, I've restored an archive of V Planet!, one of the most loved QB magazines and game review sites of all time. Also, Fling-master recently uploaded archives of QB45.com and QBRPGs.com.

Finally, I urge everyone to check out Lachie Dazdarian's "A Love Letter To FreeBASIC" Competition (Oct 2018 - Jan 2019). This final competition from the Freebasic Games Directory, has a $250 prize, and is "a chance for them to give one final farewell to FreeBASIC." The competition encourages programmers who were once active in the Freebasic scene to make one final FB game to say goodbye to this community and language that was so near and dear to us.

Posted by Pete |

October 19, 2008Pete's QBasic Site celebrates TEN YEARS
Pete's QB Site is now a decade old!

On the rainy day of October 12, 1998, Pete's QBasic Site was born. I was thirteen years old, and never expected that ten years later this website would still exist, or that it would still be updated. But here I am, here you are, and Pete's QBasic Site is still alive and kickin'!

Also, this site was featured a few days ago on the front page of Reddit.com: Share QBasic or it dies. A user posted a link to the QB Philosophy section, where several visitors shared their answers to the question: "Why do you still program in QBasic?" It sent thousands visitors to this site, and spurred a great discussion where people shared some of their own QBasic memories.

September 20, 2008QB Express #29 Now Available
Published from the colorful mountains of Tibet, QB Express #29 is here!

Although I'm in the middle of a 6-month trek around the world, I've found the time to put together another fantastic issue of QB Express. This is a very special issue: Not only is it the first time we've published from central Asia, it also celebrates the tenth anniversary of Pete's QB Site!

Articles this month include "Before Releasing Your Game" by Nalin Kanwar; "Mini Game of the Month" by Lachie Dazdarian; a look at the Y2K bug by Moneo; an interview with Lachie by HexDude; "Kiyotewolf on a Variety of Subjects" and more. The tutorials section includes a look at CGI and also Shuffling Algorithms by Samanddeanus; Part two of Wallyfblu's Window Procedure series; "Using 7x7x16 Tricks" by Kiyotewolf; and "The Pimpl Idiom" by stylin. Not to mention all the News Briefs, the Gallery, and letters sections that you've come to expect from QBE.

This issue is full of wonderful things, like SEVEN tutorials and FIVE articles, all about QBasic and FreeBasic.

Pritchard teaches us about Game Camera Systems; Imortis Inglorian brings us "Bitflags and You"; Kiyote Wolf gives us the rundown on his method of "Amazing Cheap Texturemapping"; Lachie Dazdarian contemplates the eternal struggle of "The Game Developer versus the Programmer"; Mac gives us the skinny on the QBasic.com forums; notthecheatr starts his series on "Scripting Solutions for Games" with "Part I: Rolling your own interpreter"; and Pritchard talks to us "About Design."

This month, we've got a collection of fantastic articles and tutorials that pack quite a whallop -- so watch out! This may not be the biggest QB Express issue that's ever come out, but it certainly is no slouch... with SEVEN tutorials and THREE articles, as well as one of the biggest news briefs sections we've had in a long time.

MystikShadows reviews Dabooda's game Sokoban; h4tt3n gives us the second part of his series on Spring Simulation in Freebasic; Mentat brings us "Going Deep: Football and 3D Graphics"; Hezad teaches us how to generate awesome moving plasmas using the Electric Field equation; Wallyfblu teaches us about Window Procedure; Dean Menezes brings us "CGI and QBasic"; and Kiyote Wolf helps us reinvent the Commodore Wedge. And as always, we've got all the latest news from around the QB and FB community, and much, much more.

February 9, 2008QB Express #26
The February issue of QB Express is now available!

It's been over three months since the last issue, but it definitely was worth the wait. This issue features one of our largest News Brief segments ever, as well as NINE articles/tutorials, covering topics such as "The Art of Rounding"; creating your own Worms-like scrolling engine; using FMOD to play sound in your Freebasic programs; Database indexing; programming spring physics in FB; and functions with local variables.

QB Express is definitely getting back on track, and I think this issue will prove that.

December 28, 2007Freebasic Forum Opens
The last few months, there has been a lot of debate over whether this site is a dedicated exclusively to QBasic/QuickBasic, or whether we cover Freebasic as well.

If you haven't noticed, QB Express has been covering Freebasic ever since the day it was first released, and now more than half of our content is consistently Freebasic-related! I have also made (slow) progress toward adding new Freebasic sections to Pete's QB Site. The way I see it, Freebasic is almost like the next natural version of QuickBasic -- only it wasn't released by Microsoft.

FreeBasic was created by members of the QBasic community, and almost all of its users are former QB programmers. From the beginning, a major goal was to keep FreeBasic as compatible with QuickBasic as possible, while enhancing its functionality and abilities. This is the important distinction between FB and other dialects of BASIC you'll find online: FB was designed by QB programmers to be the next logical step in the QBasic lineage. That's why I have decided to expand my site to include Freebasic in addition to QBasic.

Tonight, I created a new forum for FreeBasic Questions & Answers, where you are free to ask questions about and discuss FB without fear that the "QB establishment" will hound you. Likewise, I expect the FB fans out there to stop bullying QB programmers by recommending that they switch over to FB. From now on, let's just try to help each other and get along!

October 31, 2007QB Express #25
Happy Halloween! The October Issue of QB Express is now available.

This special Halloween edition has very little to do with pumpkins or ghosts, but is bursting through the seams with what you all really crave: QuickBasic and Freebasic! There are EIGHT tutorials this month, covering everything from floormapping and sphere mapping, to recursion, to peek and poke, to particle engines, to acceleration. We've also got some cool articles on User Oriented Programming, accessibility and file names, and "The multi-faceted nature of games."

Syntax: ONFunction: This keyword can be put before things like PEN, COM(n), ect. and a GOTO or GOSUB can go afterwards. This causes the program to go to another place in the program when a certain event occurs.

Description: At first this site looks like it's got a lot of great stuff on it, but then you realize that all of its content is directly linked to other sites. Not just copied and reformatted--Everything QBasic directly links to other sites for everything it has.Unique Features: The Tips page is Acid Works', the Tutorials are Simply QB's, the Files page is broken, as are the FAQs, the Guestbook, the Discussion Board and the rest of the site. The only thing good here is the Tutorials section, which, as I already mentioned, doesn't even belong to this site.

Founded in 1998 by Pete Berg, Pete's QBASIC Site was the first dedicated QB game reviews site, and also provides tutorials, scene news and an active message forum. In 2004, QB Express Magazine was launched, and this site also began covering QB's sister language, Freebasic. Pete's QBASIC Site is a resource for QBASIC and QuickBasic programmers, and seeks to promote and perpetuate the QuickBasic programming language and online community.